Crowdfunding Pick of the Week: Is that a Monkey in your Pocket?

It is 1 millimeter thick, fits in a wallet and has 12 functions. Functioning as a phone stand, orange peeler and bottle opener to a ruler, hex wrench and straight edge, this all-in-one tool is no larger than a standard credit card.

The Pocket Monkey is a wallet utility tool that easily slides into any standard credit card wallet slot. Its creator, Nate Barr, is asking for funding through Kickstarter to help fund its first production run.

Barr, of Boston, Mass., created the PocketMonkey after he came to the realization that normal pocket tools are too heavy to carry around on a daily basis. The Pocket Monkey weighs only 2 ounces. “You won’t even know it’s in your wallet, but you could always have it with you,” Barr said in his project’s Kickstarter video.

Barr, a mechanical engineer, has experience working as a product designer for medical products and has collaborated with industrial designers, according to Kickstarter. Working as a mechanical engineer helped Barr exercise the left side or logical part of his brain, while “exploring the intersection between art and consumer technology” on his own allows him to try his hand at exercising the right side, or creative part, of his brain.

“PocketMonkey is my first entrepreneurial project that pairs both sides of my experience,” Barr said on Kickstarter. “This project has been my own work from start to finish.”

The PocketMonkey can easily be used to peel an orange or nick a banana. As a screwdriver, the PocketMonkey is a micro and large flat-head as well as a Phillips. The utility tool is a bottle opener, hex wrench, letter opener, ruler and door latch slip. And, the PocketMonkey is a cellphone stand. A credit card easily slides though a slot on the PocketMonkey, which props the utility tool up. This allows a cellphone to lean against the utility tool and be propped up by the credit card.

With so many functions it would be easy to forget what each slot and hole on the PocketMonkey is for, but Barr has it covered. He also thought about the strength of the utility tool.

“After several prototypes, I have refined the design to be production ready,” Barr said on Kickstarter. “The final design uses 1 millimeter stainless steel that is hardened to four times the normal strength. It is slightly smaller than a credit card, so that it can easily slide into a variety of wallet slots. It also features text reminders for each function that are laser etched as the final production step.”

Pledging at least $9 will get backers a PocketMonkey of their own from the product’s first production run. The first 500 of these backers will receive their PocketMonkeys by Dec. 24, according to Kickstarter. After that, $12 will get backers a PocketMonkey from the second production run.

As of Dec. 1, backers have pledged $4,110. The project will only be funded if at least $4,500 is raised by Dec. 14.